We good? Hi, everyone. I'm Lance Vitanza, senior analyst at TD Cowen. Thanks everybody for being here. I'm just here to introduce John Garner. John is the founder of WeShop, which is a social commerce platform built around the idea of community ownership. Users earn equity for everyday shopping and referrals. The company has proven out this model in the U.K. and is now focused on scaling into the U.S. as it begins its next phase as a publicly listed company. John, we're so happy to have you with us. Take it away. Hi, everybody. Thank you for being here and listening to our retail revolution, which we're going to talk about now. Before we actually get into this though, one of the problems that we wanted to solve was if we look at these amazing companies, the majority are in the U.S. Look at Amazon, look at Facebook, look at Twitter, look at Pinterest, all these amazing companies. When they've come to maturity or a listing, where's the value being dispersed? The founders, obviously it was their idea. If they didn't have the idea, the company wouldn't be in existence. You've got the investors, they put the risk capital up. Absolutely they deserve some value back. You've got the employees who work every day very hard to grow value in the business. When we looked at it, we said there's one group of people who aren't appearing on the cap table, and that's all of you, because you've helped build the value in those businesses, but you're not getting a financial benefit from it. Before we go into WeShop and tell you about the journey and our exciting plans for the U.S., I just want to frame it like this. Imagine if way back when, you've all heard of a company called Amazon, I presume, and you've all shopped from Amazon, I presume. Imagine right at the beginning, if every time you shopped at Amazon and spent $100, imagine if Mr. Bezos had given you $5 of stock in Amazon at the previous day's close price. What would that be worth today? At zero investment cost for you. I just want you to hold onto that thought as we go through this presentation. In terms of what WeShop's vision is, vision is for the slideshow to work. No. There we go. Here we go. Look, the vision is we wanted to create a shopping app integrating all the retailers where the actual benefit for the users is equity ownership. We want to give people ownership in the platform they use at zero investment cost. We created something called ShareBack. Think cashback. We all know what cashback is. We all know Rakuten, we all know Ibotta, but we're actually giving ShareBack. We apply a ShareBack rate for every purchase through every retailer effectively. Let's show you the platform so you can actually see it. Sorry. We can go with this. This is the platform. Welcome to WeShop. You might even recognize this character here on the right-hand side. Look, you get a home feed, which is fantastic. Those are recommendations from everyone you follow. They might be posting about their favorite products because WeShop's not just a shopping platform, it's a recommendation platform as well. Of course, you can go shopping, so you go to the shopping main page where all the retailers are on there, and you literally click onto the retailer. It takes you to the site, check out as normal. We don't touch the money, we don't touch the stock, we don't touch the returns, we don't touch the customer service. You also get your dashboard so you can see effectively what your WePoints are worth, which then obviously turn into shares, and that happens after 13 months. You can search products. In the U.K., across our 1,000 retailers, we're pulling about 1.2 billion products into the system every day. You can build wishlists, you can recommend products, you can ask questions to the community because one of the other things that WeShop is built on is we actually believe that friends want to help each other. The oldest marketing and most successful marketing mechanism in the world is friends recommending products to each other because not only do you trust your friends, they've actually spent their own money on it rather than some kind of paid advertising. You can have your profile. On your profile, you can, again, upload things that you love, and every single post is shoppable. Every single piece of media, every video, every caption, every picture, everything is linked to a product which you can then buy. How do you earn shares or how do you earn the ShareBack? Shopping is normal. As you can see on the left-hand side, as I said before, you go to the shopping page. It's very simple. It tells you what your ShareBack rate is, and then you go out, so for example, on this example onto Walgreens, takes you out to Walgreens, you shop as normal, you check out as normal, and Walgreens are going to deliver the item. Now, the other way to earn shares as well is referring friends. Again, we've all got a social circle. Every time you refer someone, which is very easy to do, and they shop, you are going to earn shares off the back of their shopping activity as well. Where this is really interesting in the model, Lance and I have had several conversations about this, is by giving the shares to people, that's effectively your customer acquisition cost. It's a non-cash item to acquire users. From a business model point of view, if you think about it, we as a business are getting paid by the retailers through the affiliate networks or through advertising, and we're rewarding with a non-cash item. You can imagine what that does to the cash flow. If we go onto the next slide, we did a U.K. pilot. We did a U.K. pilot and we purposely made it as hard on ourselves as possible. Every marketing agency in the world will talk about clicks and impressions and all these amazing metrics, but we wanted to be as hard on ourselves as possible. We said, 'We're going to make it invitation only. We're not going to do any paid acquisition. Any celebrities that we partner with or influencers, we're not paying them any cash. We're going to do it in the United Kingdom, where the ownership of stocks is significantly on a percentage basis a lot less than the U.S. We're going to make it as hard on ourselves as possible. Also, we're going to do it for at least 12 months, so we don't fluke the data.' It's really, really important. We finished our pilot. We did over GBP 100 million of GMV, which was great. Over 800,000 transactions, as you can see. The things that were very exciting for us out of the pilot and the lessons we learned, and I'll tell you about some of those acquisition tools, was what the average order value was. It's high, because we've got all the travel retailers. We've got Expedia, Booking.com. If you think about it from a user point of view, you can go to WeShop, click out to Expedia, use your Amex card, so you still get your Amex points, you get your Expedia points, and you're getting WeShop shares. We're a level of value add. For high ticket items like travel, why wouldn't you use it? The other very interesting statistic here as well is the first purchase conversion. Any of you that are in retail will notice that that is a very high number, which is fantastic. What we also learned through the pilot was when people actually used it and they understood it, they used it again and again and again. When they really felt part of the community and felt part of this amazing thing, which is user ownership, they really got behind it and used it. Let's excuse me, guys, can we get the slides to work, please? Or not. I'll keep going. During the pilot, what we found was what we worked in really well in terms of acquisition was we'd have some what we called tier 1 talent. We had Team WeShop and hopefully we can show you some of the people. That was various England soccer players. There was some pop stars in there, models, influencers. What it really created was credibility, which was great, and they have enormous reach in terms of amplification of the message. What we also found was another group of people, which we called our founders. We actually initiated something called a founder program. What we did was people that have got a network of people themselves, we created WhatsApp groups for them, which then allowed them basically to launch competitions, to do education, and everything that went through it. What we saw was that combined with doing various events to create the content really created this dynamic where it was exciting. People were using it, people were talking about it. People wanted to go to the event. For example, we did Soccer Aid for UNICEF, which is the biggest charity soccer game in the U.K. for UNICEF. That was absolutely brilliant. We invited 500 of our people. Oh, look, here's some of Team WeShop. People like Mo Farah, gold medalist in the Olympics. Mo's line was he was in it for the long run. We had people like Jill Scott, who was the captain of the ladies' soccer team and all these people. We had great fun doing it. They were their own community as well. We didn't pay them cash. They were all stock deals and they were all on exactly the same deal. That created its own community, which was great. Some of them you'll actually see in the summer in the U.S. at the World Cup. These are the founders that we're talking about. It was majority women. They're absolutely amazing. Then we had, as you can see, all these WhatsApp groups which were crazy and like I said, the competitions and the education. What we saw was all these people are then really helping each other and helping them educate about the stock market and about what WeShop is and what it could be as well, which is fascinating. As you can see some of the videos, it was quite chaotic at times, as you can see. We finished our U.K. pilot. Brilliant, super. We're happy with it. It worked. Brilliant. We always wanted to come to the U.S., and why did we come to the U.S.? It still excites me now, is that understanding of stock ownership here. Fidelity, 45 million accounts. Charles Schwab, 37 million accounts. Robinhood, 25 million accounts. If you think about it, what are we actually doing? We're saying, "Do the shopping you're doing anyway and we're going to give you shares at a zero investment cost." Obviously, loyalty program's a lot bigger in the U.S. and just the size of the online retail market is obviously a lot bigger. We came to the U.S. and we had somewhat of a problem in that our lawyer said, "This is absolutely brilliant, John, but you have a problem because you are effectively selling securities." To which I said, "We're not selling securities, we're giving them away for free." To which Christian Nagler, who's an amazing lawyer, said, "John, I'm the securities lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis. I think I know what I'm talking about." To which I said, "Okay." I said, "How do we solve this, Christian?" He goes, "Well, it's simple. We've just got to list." I said, "Okay, loads of companies list on Nasdaq. How hard can that be?" He goes, "The only problem is, John, no one's actually ever done this before at this scale, where effectively we're giving 50% of the business to the community." He goes, "I don't think it's going to be a straightforward listing." Two years it took us to do a direct listing on Nasdaq and again, the guys at TD Cowen have followed the journey and I think one of the comments was, "I think, John, you're the craziest guy in New York because you don't want to raise any money, you don't want to sell any shares, and you want to float the company at the lowest possible value." I said, "Of course, because it's in the interest of the users." Anyway, we got there. We did a direct listing on November the 14th, which will be a day that stays in our memory forever. We came and we rang the bell the following Thursday. Between the Friday and the Thursday, the stock had gone from $20 up to $250, valuing the company at $5 billion, and we didn't have a single user in the U.S. It was an interesting ride, and it was educating us about the U.S. market. What it did allow us to do there, everyone was interested in the story. Everyone was like, "What is this thing? We haven't heard of it before. You're actually giving the company back to the people that create the value?" We got some amazing press and lucky enough to go on places like Bloomberg where they have a curved escalator. Who knew? Thank you. Which was all a great experience. Now it's a case of we've got to build the business in the U.S. We signed up all the retailers that you would imagine through the affiliate networks. We are doing testing with the app at the moment. To be honest, we started testing it with various users as well in terms of how we'd done it in the U.K. with the founders. We did an event in Miami, again, with all women again, who've already got shopping networks themselves. We went through it. We showed them what they could potentially earn through the calculator that we've created. We showed them what we actually believe in because, for me, one of the big beliefs is if typically the lady who's the Chief Financial Officer of the household, as we call her, is doing her shopping and she's getting shares for doing that, what that impact could be on the children in the future. Go back to that Amazon example. $1,000 of Amazon stock at the IPO is worth over $1 million today. Imagine if you're getting it for free. We did an event in Miami. It was very well-received. We pitched the concept of the Founders program again, and every single one of the ladies wanted to sign up and be part of it. It was great to see that the desire is here as well. One of the questions we always get asked, and Lance, this was the very first question you asked. They said, "If you're giving shares to everyone all the time, surely you're diluting everyone all the time. You're just issuing shares. We don't know what the value of the business is." To solve that, what we did was we issued all the 50% into a special purpose trust based in Delaware. All shares are outstanding. When you get your shares, we're simply transferring the shares to you. We're not minting new shares. The questions that everyone asks is always this dilution point, and then it always comes back onto what the CAC is. One of the other things that we tested as well is all these products on the right-hand side of the screen that you can see, you all use them, but you don't enjoy paying for them unless anyone in the room can say they enjoy paying for their insurance, paying their mobile phone bill. Lance, do you enjoy paying your mobile phone bill? No. You do not, exactly. We started thinking if we wanted to set up a white label mobile phone network now, the biggest problem we would all have is: how are we going to get the users? What's the CAC going to be? How are you going to get them? We've seen companies like Patriot Mobile and white label insurance businesses. The beautiful thing about this model is we've already got you as a user because not only are you a user, you're actually a shareholder. We did our own research with our community, to be able to roll out white label products, which you genuinely don't like buying, again, why wouldn't you use WeShop to do that? The products are going to be as good as what you're buying anyway. Might even be cheaper because we don't have that customer acquisition cost. The future of WeShop, fine, it's retail at the moment, but the future can go into finance, it can go into mobile phones, it can go into all kinds of different areas that you buy anyway. From our point of view, this business is very scalable. As I said right at the beginning, we don't touch anything. We don't touch the products, we don't touch the money, we don't touch the returns, we don't touch the customer service. We just sit there in the middle with our technology stack, which then scales globally as we go into each jurisdiction. We use the affiliate networks, which everyone knows are a very well robust system that have been around for 15 years. We can go, subject to securities laws in each of those jurisdictions, we can then scale the business very quickly. As I said at the beginning, the U.S. has always been where we want to be. We're in the process now of building a business in the U.S. We're in the process of building team here. It is so exciting. Even since the listing, we've been absolutely amazed at how well-received the business has been and the help we've had from our advisors and the introductions and what is actually possible with this business. I remember saying, again, when I first started coming here, of course, we've got financial models. We've got very big screens in the office because they go out quite a long way. I always say in my very simple English way, I say, "Well, do we think there's a million people in the U.S. that understand what stocks and shares are?" To which everyone says, "Well, yes, of course, John, because Robinhood have got 25 million users." I said, "Okay, second stupid question of the day. Do we think there's a million people that spend $1,000 a month on travel, clothes, online food, presents, all the stuff that we buy?" "Of course there is, John. What a stupid question." I said, "Okay, a million people spending $1,000 is $1 billion of GMV a month." If you think about what our take rate is, go and look at any cash back site, you can figure out what the take rate is because that's what the rates are. Hypothetically, say it's 5%. If we're making $50 million of revenue a month off a million people spending $ 1,000, what are our costs? Our costs are our staff, our advisors, what do we do with the rest of that cash? Could be that we may be going to look at some M&A. Could be that we pay a dividend. Could be that we do a share buyback. That's with a million people spending $ 1,000, I believe there's more than a million people in the U.S. that would use this platform potentially. We're super excited. It's been a very strange listing because we had to be listed to launch the business. Typically, everyone lists when they've got maturity in their business and they're wanting to grow. As I said, we listed with no users and it still went to $ 5 billion. We're enjoying the journey. We're really enjoying the journey. We've got some really exciting things coming up, especially around building team in the U.S., and really can't wait to work further with Lance and the TD Cowen team, and really get that message out there when we're ready. When we're ready with the product, when we're ready with our acquisition policies, when we're ready with the team, when we're ready with our infrastructure. When we are ready, you will definitely hear about us. That's the presentation. If there's any questions, then please fire away. Questions from the room. I know I have several. Oh, hold on. Can you talk about what categories you want to start with? Just give her one second to get a microphone because we're webcasting. Thank you. Hi. Thanks. Congratulations on your IPO. Thank you. Could you talk about what categories you want to start with in the U.S.? You're not going to start with all of these. You're going to start with a few, right? Well. Tell us how you really will attempt to get your consumer shareholder trust to bring over more transactions from additional categories? Yeah. To make this flywheel spin. Using the U.K. pilot just as an example, it really is true that 80% of the volume came from the top 20 retailers. It's everything that you would imagine in terms of it was travel, fast fashion, eBay was a big retailer for us. We typically like things that are visual as well, so people can share their recommendations rather than just buying. Travel's a big sector because they're high-ticket items, and the percentages we get from those online travel agencies such as Expedia or Booking.com are typically quite good. The online travel agencies are also really good working with us by saying, they'll tell us, "If you do X amount of transactions, we'll give you more percentage." Travel for us is a really big one. It's very visual. We like beauty as well, again, because there's good margins in it. The affiliate commissions are higher, so we like beauty. Beauty's also very good because it's very instructional. When people are doing recommendations and people we're working with, people have an opinion on it. We like categories where there are opinions. Food and drink as well is another good one. Everyone has a different view on a different bottle of wine. It's amazing when you actually delve into those communities how everyone's opinion is different, and then everyone trusts it. For example, got some friends here, Rob, who loves his wine. If I said to him, "I've just found this Italian super Tuscan, which is half the price of a bottle of Tignanello," he's buying it because he trusts me. Anything where there's opinion is we love those categories. Whilst all the categories will be on there, we like to focus on the travel, the food and beverage, and the beauty and fast fashion are typically very good. Yes. If people purchase these large purchase items through you, but also through another seller like Expedia or whatever, so you don't handle the customer service? No. Anything like that? We don't touch anything. We are effectively, you come to our site, go to the shopping page, you see the logo, or you can search for a product, it will take you out to the retailer. Click on the logo of the retailer, takes you to the retailer's website. You're transacting with them exactly as you would normally. We're tracking you in the background effectively, we're rewarding you with those shares. Again, we are a value add, you can still, like I said, go to eBay. You would use your Amex card, you'd get your Amex points or whatever your credit card might be, you'd get the eBay loyalty rewards if they've got a program. For example, Expedia do have a loyalty program, I use it all the time for Expedia. I use my Amex card to get my points, I get my Expedia points, and then I get my shares as well on top. It's a value add. Where's the value coming from? Is Expedia- Yeah. Sitting outside? Absolutely. Expedia are paying us for driving the transaction, and in the U.K. as well, we tested with advertising revenues as well. There's obviously another angle here around data. One of the things that we're very passionate about is when you think about it, no one, as far as I'm concerned, and Lance, maybe you can tell me differently, has almost created a data marketplace. For example, Rob, I'm going to pick on you again, sorry. Rob's just booked his holiday to go to Barbados through Expedia. Great, Rob's going to Barbados next week. Wouldn't Bloomingdale's love to know, because Rob last year bought a pair of Vilebrequin swimming shorts, wouldn't Bloomingdale's love to know that Rob's going to Barbados next week? Then they can pitch him a new pair of swimming shorts or whatever it might be. We think there's a real opportunity to create almost a data marketplace for the benefit of all the retailers. Yes, it's a community of users, but it's also a community of retailers. We want to build that community, and we all want to help to drive more sales, which gives us more money, which makes the company worth more for you. I'm in. There we go. See, it's not shopping anymore. It's investing. Any other questions from the room? All right. Well, just chime in whenever the question strikes you. Let me start with one. Sticking with the retailers, why do the retailers sign with you? Do they prefer working with you versus other channel partners, or are you just one of many? We've built some really good relationships with retailers in the U.K. They go through the affiliate networks. The affiliate networks have been around for 20 years, as we know. The thing that they liked about us was they liked people putting up recommendations using their products. They're not paying those people to go, "This is an amazing bottle of wine." You're getting real content from real people in a real social network. Actually promoting their product for nothing. They really like that angle of it. They also really like the community side of it. One of my favorite business models in the world ever is the cooperative. There's a reason why it's one of the oldest business models in the world and still going, because it works. There's companies in the U.K. like John Lewis, which is all about employees owning the business, and that whole shared community around ownership really resonated with the retailers. The retailers that we're advertising with is some of the big names. They'd be repeat advertising. They liked what we were doing with the events as well. Again, doing the thing that we did with Soccer Aid for UNICEF, and that raised GBP 17 million for UNICEF. They liked what we were doing and the way we were doing it. A couple questions about the ShareBack rate. I saw on one of the slides earlier, that the consumer actually sees that rate- Correct. Before they make the purchase. How dynamic do you expect that rate to be? Is that changing day to day, week to week, hour to hour? Yeah. We can pull the rates through the affiliate network. For example, they're giving us 10% in cash, so we can then change that rate, the ShareBack rate. It might be higher if we're just trying to push some volume, or it might be lower so we've got a margin there. We can change those rates dynamically, effectively through the system, which is great. Everything is dynamic. How does the rate for the purchaser compare with the rate for the referral that took me? Yeah. Basically, the referrer at the moment is getting 5% of whatever the points the purchaser got. What we saw, which was really interesting, is a lot of the ladies we were dealing with in the founder program, they're all in network marketing. They're going, "John, this is brilliant because we've got a network of people that buy our beauty products off it, and we're not selling anything to anyone." They're saying, "Just use this app. It costs you nothing, and you're getting something for free." Their referral shares they were getting, suddenly they were earning real numbers on those shares, and it's cost them nothing because they've already got a network, and they're not selling anything. The U.K. expansion strategy, what do you see as the key differences between your experiences in the U.K. and what you expect will be your experience in the U.S.? I think the U.S., from what we've experienced so far, they have a much greater understanding of ownership and stocks and shares, and you can see that by the numbers, in terms of how many people have brokerage accounts in the U.S. There seems to be, in the U.S. as well, much more hunger towards something like this and the understanding. I think in the U.K., and obviously I'm from the U.K., the financial literacy, in my opinion, isn't there. I think it's very intimidating still for a lot of people around stocks and shares, and they still think the stockbrokers are those scary people that wear red braces and pinstripe suits. Even if you look at the U.K., and again, we were talking about this last night at dinner, I find it amazing that the U.K. brokerages still charge on a per trade basis to trade stocks. Where's the free trading? It really is the difference. The thing that obviously keeps me going at night is I keep going back to if we can educate, again, go back to the moms to do their shopping where their children are getting the benefit of the shares, and you are actually creating generational wealth potentially. For us, that's the main thing. I look at this, everyone goes, "Oh, it's a company." I say, "It's not a company. This is a philosophy." I think the title of this whole conference, The Future of Consumer, for me, is one word, ownership. That's it. You mentioned that you haven't yet launched broadly in the U.S. When do you expect to do that, and what are the milestones that you need to accomplish to get from here to there? Building team. In the U.S., we are not going to be running the business from the wrong side of the Atlantic. Building team, getting the right people in place. We filed a post-effective amendment to the registration statement for the WePoints, so we can flex the rates more as well. We've done some product testing in the U.S. already, so we know what we need to alter with the product. In terms of timing, I wouldn't commit to that because it just depends when the new team come in, how comfortable they feel, whether we go before Christmas or whether we go after Christmas. As soon as we know, Lance, you'll be the first to know. Any other questions from the room? If not, I've got one more. If WeShop succeeds, what does the business look like at scale? In the registration statements, we have something called performance incentive grants, effectively options. I have one option that triggers a $1 trillion valuation. Maybe that highlights where my ambition is, where I see where this business could potentially go.